Shroud of Night

by Andy Clark

  She came to tell him that this dream must end. That a time of testing was upon him. That hope could come only from despair, victory only from pain. Day, only from night.

  He understood that her words were only for him, and he steeled himself to do his duty to the Emperor, no matter the cost to him, and to everyone he loved.

  A new darkness was coming, thought Kaleb sadly. The nightmares must prevail. For without their reign, without their time, the dawn could not break again.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Standing atop the steps of Hive Endurance’s primary teleportarium, Magos-ethericus Corphyx raised his staff and unleashed a searing bolt of energy. The blast struck a traitor square in the chest, annihilating him from the diaphragm up before he had finished materialising. The Chaos Space Marine’s legs and midriff tottered and fell, splattering blood and innards across the teleportarium platform.

  ‘Clean that away,’ buzzed Corphyx to a servitor. ‘It besmirches the holy dais.’

  The cyborg twittered in binharic and shambled to do the magos’ bidding. Corphyx had already dismissed it from his memory banks.

  ‘Ohmdeacon Dynipsis,’ he said, transmitting his vocal emissions via empasonic carrier waves. ‘Are the lower platforms secure?’

  The leader of Corphyx’s electro-priest congregation, the ohmdeacon stood hundreds of feet below, near the base of the teleportarium shrine. He turned blinded eyes up towards his distant master as he replied. His voice crackled with motive force.

  ‘Praise the Omnissiah, magos-ethericus, they remain sacrosanct,’ he said, his reply carried by the reverberant waves of the motive force to Corphyx’s aural intake antennae. Around him, Corphyx’s magnified optics could see more servitors hauling away the bodies of Khorne worshippers that had fallen to Dynipsis’ acolytes. The bodies were being flung into the undernarthex for later incineration.

  ‘That is pleasing to the lord of machines, ohmdeacon,’ said Corphyx. ‘Know that his myriad lenses look upon your deeds with optimal commendation.’

  ‘Magos-ethericus!’ barked a voice much closer to hand, fleshy and unaugmented.

  Corphyx ignored it for the moment, plunging his quad-cortex into the noospheric data streams that flowed through the teleportarium. The sacred coronae of teleportation flares continued to flash in an acceptable – if slow – approximation of the divine sequence. He noted that rigs four, seven, twelve and eighteen had ceased to send their promethium libations.

  That was displeasing, but not statistically unexpected. The invaders had been sure to interfere with the Omnissiah’s holy works. Unbelievers were sent to test the faithful, and some were found wanting. Still, barrels of processed promethium continued to flash into being on most of the teleportarium platforms, to be snatched up and spirited away by sentinels.

  That was pleasing.

  ‘Magos-ethericus, please!’ shouted the voice again. ‘I must insist that you enact the Dysorian protocols at once!’

  Feeling a flash of all-too-human irritation, Corphyx rerouted his primary perception routines to his interpersonal emulators. His optics awoke, directing a cold glare at the Tsadrekhan lieutenant before him. The man stood upon the top step below Corphyx’s shrine, red-faced and frantic. Ten troopers stood behind him, clutching their lasguns, trying not to show fear beneath the monstrous guns of Corphyx’s battle servitors.

  Corphyx hadn’t bothered to retain the lieutenant’s flesh-name.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ he buzzed, ‘you are asking me to sanction an act of wanton auto-desecration within a holy shrine of the Omnissiah. The technology that would be destroyed, the machine-spirits that would be exorcised, would be an irreplaceable, unforgivable loss. And the promethium would cease to flow. Also unacceptable. I will not comply with this heretical request.’

  ‘Magos Corphyx,’ said the lieutenant, his voice registering exceptional emotional stress. ‘We have stockpiles of promethium to last over a year. Meanwhile, there are enemy forces gaining access to the hive via your facility. They – you – are compromising the safety of Hive Endurance, and thereby the beacon, and thereby the entire Tsadrekhan Unity!’

  ‘Every combat-capable heretical bio-unit that has gained access to this facility has been eliminated within a maximal temporation of six-point-one-four seconds,’ replied Corphyx. ‘My congregation have mapped optimal extermination patterns to every dais and are running constant sensor sweeps to ensure instantaneous lethal response to any unauthorised etheric transit. The foe may appear within the teleportarium, lieutenant, but they do not live long enough to capitalise upon that fact.’

  ‘Magos-ethericus,’ pleaded the lieutenant, ‘I have direct orders from Canoness Levinia herself.’

  ‘This is the Omnissiah’s house,’ said Corphyx. ‘The Cult Imperialis holds no sway here.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ the lieutenant pressed on, ‘my orders are to render this teleportarium inactive by any means necessary. By any means, magos. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘You are attempting to convey a threat of potential violence and/or extreme sanction, but you find the concept both emotionally distressing and distasteful, and thus are reluctant to vocalise it directly,’ said Corphyx. ‘I understand your subtext with clarity, lieutenant. And I can assuage your concerns in that regard. Any attempt by you or your singularly inadequate detail of soldiers to cause harm to either myself or this holy sanctum will result in your immediate terminal sanction by my servitors. I hope that I, in my turn, make myself understood.’

  ‘I don’t want to die here, fighting my own side,’ said the lieutenant. ‘And I don’t want you to kill my boys, but I swear by the Throne itself if you don’t comply right away I’ll call in enough reinforcements to burn you and your precious shrine to ashes.’

  Corphyx shunted a command to his servitors’ neuro-receptors, preparing to trigger their extermination protocols. Before he could complete the exload, screams and gunfire echoed up from below.

  Magnifying his optics, Corphyx saw a towering warrior in scorched, blood-red armour plough into the midst of his electro-priests. Jolts of motive force arced and leapt as glowing holy men hurled themselves at the figure, but with every sweep of his chainaxe he smashed them away like broken dolls.

  A crimson mist billowed in the warrior’s wake, and the magos-

  ethericus was in no doubt as to its nature. His empyric spectroanalytics confirmed it beyond a doubt.

  ‘Reality breach,’ he buzzed. ‘Malefic spectral dissonance. All units retask, eliminate that warrior, pattern sanctis reductum.’

  As one, Corphyx’s servitors and acolyte priests turned their weapons upon the blood-wreathed Berzerker. A storm of incredible energies engulfed him, and the electro-priests he fought. Plasma, phosphor flames, lasers, voltaic blasts, all rained down upon the shrine’s lowest steps until Corphyx was forced to dim his optics to avoid their receptors burning out.

  ‘Cease,’ ordered Corphyx, calculating that the target’s chances of survival had dropped to zero. ‘Resume targeting subroutines upon the teleportarium platforms.’

  The red mist billowed upwards, coiling and churning into screaming faces and grasping, ephemeral claws. With a roar, the red-armoured warrior burst from its leading edge, scorched and smouldering but very much alive. At his heels came unnatural things, blood-fleshed terrors of the warp clutching black, smoking blades.

  ‘Magos!’ shrieked the lieutenant. ‘You have to destroy the–’

  A thunderous volley rang out. Corphyx’s servitors chuntered as they reloaded their weapons, and the magos-ethericus dismissed the charred remains of the lieutenant and his soldiers as irrelevant.

  The towering warrior was charging up the steps, closing the gap by the moment, a tide of daemons boiling into reality behind him. As they passed the teleportarium platforms, the machines’ holy energies were corrupted, white lightning turning blood red and ripping inwards to tear implosive
holes in the flesh of time and space. Terrible things stirred in their shadows, then surged forth to join the charge.

  ‘Abomination!’ blurted Corphyx. ‘Heresy! All units, fire to repel, spread pattern sigma-rho. Keep the promethium flowing to the last. The Omnissiah demands no less.’

  Confident that his shrine would operate for as long as it could, satisfied that he had done his duty to the Omnissiah first and foremost, Corphyx raised his staff and prepared to die with a binharic prayer cycling from his emitters.

  So fell teleportarium shrine eight-one-seven hub beta.

  It was not alone.

  Captain Dysorian backed steadily down the transit tube, firing his bolt pistol as he went. He ignored the pain of his wounds, and the amber warning runes flashing in his peripheral vision. He kept shooting, picking another cultist from the howling mass, then another, then another, gunning each one down before retargeting.

  At his side, the last two Intercessors of Squad Loriyan did the same, their bolt rifles roaring in the armourglass confines of the tube. The cultists came at them in a shrieking, blood-mad mob, firing pistols and brandishing knives. They trampled each other, froth spilling from their jaws as they sought to overrun the Imperial Fists.

  Second by second, they gained ground.

  ‘Tube terminates in eighty-three yards, my captain,’ said Sergeant Loriyan. He’d lost his helm to a bolt impact at some point, and one side of his face was a mask of blood.

  ‘A little further,’ said Dysorian, ejecting his clip and reaching for another. Instead, he found his last frag grenade. Clamping his pistol to his thigh, Dysorian hefted the grenade.

  ‘On my mark,’ said the captain. ‘Squad Ulorian, stand ready.’

  The cultists surged forward, piling over the cracked armourglass of the tunnel, crushing each other against the brushed silver railings that lined the walkway.

  ‘Now,’ he said, thumbing the grenade’s detonator and hurling it into the rabid cultists’ midst. It vanished beneath their feet. As it did, the Intercessors raked the crowd with a burst of full-auto fire, then all three Imperial Fists turned and ran along the tunnel. Bullets chased them, ricocheting off shoulder guards and power packs. Then came the dull thump and fiery roar of the grenade’s detonation, and the bullets were replaced with spinning limbs and spraying blood.

  Dysorian and his brothers burst from the end of the tube onto a broad marble plaza, almost running straight into the hulking Devastator Centurions of Squad Ulorian who waited at the tube’s mouth.

  ‘Seal it,’ barked Dysorian. The Centurion pilots voxed acknowledgement, stomping their heavy exo-suits into a semi-circle around the gilt-edged mouth of the transit tube. Once, it had been a beautifully appointed footway for the privileged and faithful. Now it was a potential weak spot in the hive’s final defence line.

  As fresh waves of cultists spilled along the tube, the Centurions opened fire. Lascannons howled and grav cannons thrummed, shattering the tunnel mouth, tearing the transit tube apart. Cultists exploded like fleshy sacs. Armourglass detonated into spinning shards, and with a terrible groan of collapsing supports the entire structure sheared away in a hundred-foot-long section. Bodies and wreckage plunged away, raining down upon the once-beautiful parkland below.

  ‘Good,’ said Dysorian. ‘Now, return to the lines, brothers.’

  Dismissed, the Centurions stomped away, servos and impellers whining. Meanwhile, Dysorian took in the situation with a strategist’s eye.

  He stood in the shadow of the Sacrosanct Arch, the place where Main Hive met the spire. Once, there had been numerous cross-over points between those two sections of Hive Endurance, but when the Great Rift opened, Canoness Levinia had ordered them all sealed barring this one.

  The arch was an immense, armoured portal whose apex was several hundred feet high. The gates, which currently stood firmly shut, were gold-plated adamantium, engraved with magnificent scenes of the Emperor enthroned, surrounded by his angelic primarchs. A mighty, armoured wall stretched away to either side of the gate, forming one edge of the cavernous chamber in which it stood, studded with gun turrets and hung with the banners of the Order of the Crimson Tear.

  Before the gate was the marble plaza on which Dysorian stood, its surface inlaid with mosaic patterns and dotted with armoured generator-blocks and defensive towers. A huge metal ramp, the Ascension Path, stretched down from the arch, several hundred feet across and a mile long, lined with statues of the Order’s previous canonesses.

  Below, the verdant parkland of the Elysial stretched out for miles, exotic plant life and magnificent fountains imported at phenomenal expense in the hive’s earliest days.

  Now, the marble plaza was thick with barricades and strongpoints, the parkland was torn through by earthworks and trench-lines, and Imperial soldiery thronged its approaches. Tsadrekhan infantry and tanks were present in their thousands. Battle Sisters moved amongst them, and knots of Imperial Fists stiffened the defence lines.

  ‘Canoness Levinia has prepared the defences well,’ noted Sergeant Loriyan.

  ‘She has,’ said Dysorian with gruff approval. ‘Let’s go and find her.’

  They found Levinia and her Celestinian bodyguards at the forward command post, halfway down the access ramp. The canoness was speaking to a senior Tsadrekhan officer amidst a mass of barricades, gun emplacements and vox arrays. Levinia was a tall, spare woman, her hair cut in a short bob, steel grey on one side of her head, onyx black on the other to match her armour.

  ‘Canoness,’ said Dysorian.

  ‘Captain Dysorian,’ said Levinia, turning away from the officer. Dismissed, he made the sign of the aquila and marched away.

  ‘The defences look sound,’ said Dysorian. ‘Will they be sufficient?’

  ‘We must have faith that they shall, captain,’ said Levinia. ‘The Emperor protects. Enemy forces have gained access to the Elysial from nine-four-four south and nine-four-three west, but the Tsadrekhans are holding them at bay.’

  Dysorian could hear gunfire echoing up from the fringes of the parkland below, and see distant fires burning amidst trees and ornamental beds.

  ‘The Third and Sixth Tsadrekhan regiments are dug in along a double line of trenchworks, with support from their Eighteenth Tank Division,’ continued Levinia. ‘They have orders to fall back to the second line should the enemy mass in sufficient strength to overrun them. My Exorcist squadrons will cover their retreat, when the time comes.’

  Dysorian had noted the strange tanks drawn up in large numbers near the base of the ramp. Black-and-bone Rhino hulls carried elaborate, weaponised pipe-organs upon their backs. Sisters sat at the keys behind each one, impresarios of destruction ready to unleash a rain of warheads with the battle-hymns of the Emperor.

  ‘Do you have viable links to the lower defences?’ asked Dysorian. ‘The docks? The Underbilge? Our vox-channels have been sorely disrupted – I’ve barely been able to reach battle-brothers upon adjoining levels.’

  ‘It’s the storm, captain,’ said Levinia. ‘The Cicatrix Maledictum pours its poison down upon us, and whispers falsehoods in our ears. The Dark Gods seek to tempt us, or to cow us with fear. But yes, these vox-arrays have been auto-sanctified every thirteen minutes by priests of the Omnissiah and the Emperor. They hold true.’

  ‘Good,’ said Dysorian. He motioned for one of the Tsadrekhan operators to step away from his station. Eyes wide at the sight of a Space Marine captain, the man quickly complied, and Dysorian held his headset carefully to his ear. It looked flimsy and delicate in Dysorian’s armoured fist.

  The captain adjusted frequencies, ignoring the half-heard whispers and distant wailing that faded in and out as he did so.

  ‘Lieutenant Lydanis,’ he voxed. ‘Lieutenant Lydanis, are you receiving?’

  Nothing but spitting static and a suggestion of cruel, mocking laughter came back to him.

  ‘If he was
your man in the Underbilge,’ said Levinia, standing at his shoulder, ‘then he is most likely slain.’

  ‘The Underbilge has fallen, then?’ asked Dysorian heavily.

  ‘There was a crash,’ said Levinia. ‘A maglev train carrying many foes. More enemies followed, then more still.’

  ‘Dorn’s fist,’ muttered Dysorian. ‘The damned tech-priests and their insistence on keeping the trains running. I warned them that the risk was unacceptable.’

  Ignoring the inscrutable stares of the tech-magi who hovered nearby, Dysorian panned through his company’s vox-channels.

  ‘This is Captain Dysorian, Imperial Fists Fourth Company. If you can hear me, brothers, respond.’

  Several of his warriors replied as he worked through the channels; Sergeant Oldreyan leading a force of Assault Marines and Repulsor Tanks in battle through the level eight-eight-three commercia; Chaplain Tolyon, cut off behind a raging firestorm in level seven-one-four nutri-storage, leading a last stand of brave Tsadrekhans; Techmarine Lynon, his gunship squadron still battling through the storm to strafe those invaders caught outside the city’s skin.

  Dysorian switched channels again.

  ‘Captain?’ came a welcome voice.

  ‘Pavras,’ said Dysorian with the ghost of a smile. ‘What is your status, brother? Where are you?’

  ‘Captain, the docks have fallen,’ voxed Pavras. ‘The storm tore them apart and drove us back. We were maintaining reserve positions through the maglev production manufactora, but then the heretics started pouring up from below.’

  Pavras broke off for a moment, and Dysorian’s mouth drew down as he heard his old friend give a retching cough.

  ‘How badly are you hurt, Pavras?’ he asked. ‘We are drawing our lines at the Sacrosanct Arch. Can you reach us?’

  Pavras laughed, a painful sound with no mirth in it.

  ‘No, my captain, I don’t believe that we can. I’ve a few battle-brothers left, a few dozen Tsadrekhans. We’re barricaded within south water-lock tertius on level zero-nine-zero. We’re going to blow the locks and try to cascade the blast through those on either side.’